Tired, in a word.
Very tired.
Probably not enough sleep, combined with not enough lower intensity rides over the last few weeks, combined with this one being fairly long and fast paced.
For the Tour of Watopia 2023’s Stage 4 Longer ride, we were off on the Dust in the Wind route. This is another new one for me, featuring two areas I tend not to visit unless forced:
- Jungle Circuit reverse
- Titan’s Grove Reverse KOM (twice)
I’m not a fan of the Jungle, as it feels like riding in soup.
And Titan’s Grove is a roller coaster, which doesn’t suit me much at all.
Visually though, both are quite nice. Which at least makes up for some small part of it.
My plan today was to find a group around my tempo pace of 3 w/kg, and then jump up a bit on each climb.
Without a warm up, I probably went too hard on the first pass of Titan’s Grove Reverse KOM, which came within 5km of the start pens. I did have the sense to ease off after this, thankfully.
However, I think the damage was done there.
After that I had a sore left knee / thigh, which felt like it was on the edge of developing into something worse for the rest of the ride. Foolishly this didn’t cause me to ease off on any of the further hard work, but in the transitions I was definitely looking for ways to do as little as I could get away with.
Mostly.
Having done the Standard ride earlier in the week, a lot of this was a repeat. The difference being the inclusion of the two passes through Titan’s Grove.
I think having done that other ride I was able to pace my efforts better today, never really over-doing anything.
What I will say is that by the time we got to ~20km remaining, and the bottom of the second pass up Titan’s Grove Reverse KOM, I was rapidly losing interest. The only thing that was keeping me going was that I knew after that section was over, the rest would be flat.
By that point I was super tired, soaking, stinking, and generally pretty miserable.
After the descent, we hit Fuego Flats Reverse and whilst I say I didn’t do too much hard work for much of this ride, by that point I did pick up the pace a bit to try and finish it faster.
That didn’t last too long though as I was flagging big time.
Anyway, glad to see this one out but in truth, not the most fun of the stages we have visited so far. I’m not sure what Stage 5 has in store, and I’m not sure if Stage 5 is the final stage.
What I do know is I’m probably going to take a rest day tomorrow, go out for a walk instead. Or maybe, if it’s not soaking wet, go for a gentle bike ride early doors. I still need to clean the bike from Thursday, so whatever happens, it’s bike wash Sunday.
